According to my research, the average sum a person would invest in bitcoins is $1000. Therefore, 4 million new users are needed in addition to the 1 million current ones to reach $7000.
That seems like a lot to ask for the next 7 months. I think chances are some bigger investment funds are going to have a big impact though.
That is only 25.8% monthly growth in userbase. Which happens to coincide with the long-term slope of the price appreciation curve.
With this adoption growth, without the logistic slowing, we would be at 2 billion people in March, 2017.
My suspicion is before we get anywhere near 2 billion people using bitcoins that there will be factors at play that will dwarf the impact on price arising out of adoption and its use in day-to-day transactions.
My fear is as the realisation dawns on the bigger players that Bitcoin is 'the one' that it will be pumped by banks and central banks who can magic large sums of fiat into existence with which to buy bitcoin (and who may even dump gold temporarily), creating the ultimate bitcoin megabubble so that billions of latecomer ordinary people and businesses buying their first bitcoins will be shafted as the great bitcoin dump starts, into pms, into land, artwork etc. into a 'better' crypto - assets that had been neglected for the period bitcoin was so attractive, even back into fiat (they could use this point to launch more 'stable' 'new crypto-dollar or new crypto-pound etc.) until bitcoin finds a stable long-term pricepoint well below (even orders of magnitude below) the hyped price the masses bought at. Problem is of course nobody beforehand can know what this price will be. We would still be in a much better world than today because with bitcoin established fiats (old or new) will not be that attractive but if central banks are deliberately hyperinflating forcing people into crypto on their pump stage people could end up with 1000th of what they had before.
Btw, I'm only just exploring this idea so please point out if there's an obvious reason this is not how the future looks!
Extrapoloting...
In the same way that morpheus tells neo that he won't have to cash out at BTC $10000 (or whatever). Neither will the big guys have to. I think when if the time comes that BTC is inherently worth that much its too late to worry about buying or selling it (from a speculative investment POV) its more about how much you have (how much you got when the getting was good). So I don't think there will be a final crash, I think this line of reasoning justifies the 'exponential pulse' pattern we see now. The value that fiat represents (if its going to) won't smoothly migrate from fiat into BTC. If its going to it would likely follow this pattern as people get in cheap and then take profits. All the profit takers do is delay the inevitable, the transfer of wealth continues, and gets ahead of itself. When I saw it the first time, it seemed like a bubble that burst. The second time I thought wow, it did it again, the third time I thought, this is ridiculous, this kind of repeated behaviour is entirely without justification and absolutely will not continue.
And yet here we are all wondering whether this is the next one. Many here will be as cynical as I. Pah we;ve seen it all before, like anyone is going to get suckered into this silly pump/dump cycle again. (Just like we thought last time?)
How many millions of people out there are still entirely oblivious to all of this and ready to fuel this go-round?
What about the next one?
Is this really 'institutional investors' stage?
Strange times.